By Joshua Ryan
Chapter 23: Your Next Career Move
I don’t know how many times I got punished during the next few months—so many times that I felt incomplete, at the end of the day, if I hadn’t been slapped around or casually put across the knee of a waiter to get my butt spanked. They loved to do that. And it was true—I was a bad busboy. I was surly. I stumbled. I broke things. Like any other servant, I deserved to be punished.
Then one morning I was lined up with the other slaps to spend 12 more hours pulling dirty plates into the kitchen, when Dev caught me by the arm and said, “Not you. You been sold.”
“Sold?”
“Yeah, I know, mon. Who’d wanta buy you? But the truck is comin.”
So that’s it, I thought. The fields. The fields where I’ll spend the rest of my life chopping dirt.
“Report to Boss Derek’s desk,” he said, with no attempt at the usual camp. “Good luck, mon.” You’ve really fucked up, I thought, when Dev wishes you good luck.
I shuffled to the desk, and there was Boss Derek, looking angry that he had to spend time dealing with me. “Bend down,” he said, and he took the King George dog tag off my collar and did something with his laptop to unlimit my distances. It was like being drummed out of the Foreign Legion. Then he said something weird. “You don’t know how lucky you are, slappie.”
There was that word “luck” again. Of course, when you’re an object, you can’t make anything happen. All you have is luck. Good luck, bad luck—somebody buys you, somebody throws you away. I’d long ago forgotten the ridiculous fantasy about Roger having trapped me and punished me and that was why I was a slave on St. Bevons. That was just an absurd way of making sense out of things, of giving things a “why.” But how was I lucky?
“Boss?”
“I’m not going to lie to you. For the way you’ve acted around here, you ought to go to the fields.”
Even though I made you rich, I thought. But I didn’t say it. I wanted to find out what was happening to me.
“Right, boss. I know it, boss.”
“But you’ve been bought by the master of a private estate. I can’t imagine why. He is known to be eccentric. Maybe he wants to fuck you.” He looked me up and down. “I doubt it, though. Take my advice and make yourself useful. This is your last chance, boy.”
I didn’t say anything. Why should I? He wasn’t my boss anymore. I just sat on a bench and waited for someone to come and take me to wherever I had to go. I wondered who my new owner was, and whether he was a weirdo or not. But at least I was leaving the King George Hotel. And I wasn’t going to the fields.
There’s a special kind of vehicle that’s used to transport slappies; I’d seen it on the streets. You can tell someone’s a big owner when he has that kind of vehicle. It’s basically just a flat-bed truck with some rails on the sides, but you can transport eight or ten slappies and make sure they’re not restless, because it has what they call slapholders installed on it. They’re like the pillory, because your arms and your head are locked between two “beams,” but all the parts are made out of steel and you can line up the pillories or even make a double line of them and gang them together so they’re totally stable. There may be some discomfort when the truck goes around a corner or over a bump, but the nice thing is that the slappie can’t move. He’s always hanging there by his arms and neck. A little choking sometimes, but that’s to be expected.
That day, I was the only slappie to be transported. Two slaps came to take me–one black, one Chinese, both 20-somethings with muscles highly evident under their suits—in a truck with elegant lettering on the doors: ALCAZAR. Nothing was said except “hop in the truck” and “head and hands—stick em in.” Then we traveled through the streets of Wellington. One thing a truck with a slapholder does—it makes the slap totally visible. Every man, woman, and slappie on the streets can see your full figure, read the gold lettering on the sides of the vehicle, and know exactly where you’re going. If you enjoy being crucified, this is the trip for you. The best part is waiting at traffic lights, where young men in ties nod to each other and snicker things like “On his way to a better paying job,” and kids lean on the truck and stare up at you, grinning.
Eventually, when your body is terminally cramped from all the bending and bouncing and swaying back and forth as the truck takes the corners and the bumps and the sudden stops, you come to a wide street with big houses, and then bigger houses, and then palaces of pastel stone, the largest of which is Alcazar—a word embossed on the gate in bronze. But the truck goes past the gate and turns downhill onto a narrow street, shaded with trees and vines and a 20-foot wall. You look for the photographer who must be there, snapping pictures for a tourist leaflet. But the next thing you see is a pair of heavy iron doors, framed with stone–also picturesque. The slap riding shotgun jumps out, unlocks and opens them. The truck drives through, the doors slam shut, and now you’re being driven down another kind of street. No trees, no flowers, just old brick buildings with bars on the windows. It’s not that they look old; you can’t tell their age. They’re well maintained. But they feel old. They feel really old.
The truck stopped in front of the biggest building. It was like an old-fashioned factory, wide and long, with a boxy clerestory running the length of the black slanted roof. Outside of the clerestory, there weren’t many windows, and all of them were covered with bars, even if they were 15 or 20 feet up. It was a grim ending to the pleasant tropical tour, but I was so happy to be unlocked from the slapholder and dragged down from the truck that it was all good to me.
The two slaps took me inside and put me in a room where there was another boss sitting at another desk. This desk wasn’t old scarred up wood; it was gun-metal steel, and sturdy. The man behind the desk was a trim middle-aged man, with a coffee complexion and the manner of the military officers that you see in movies.
“Thee new slap,” he observed, in an American accent.
“Right boss,” said one of my escorts. “Here’s its papers, boss.”
The boss accepted the familiar brown folder. He was a slappie, of course. He was in uniform, from boots to cap. The sign on his shirt said “My Name Is Nat. How May I Serve You?” But something was strange. It took me a moment to know what it was–this was the first slap I’d ever seen that was wearing long pants. He had long sleeves on his shirt, but I was wearing long sleeves too, because I came from the hotel, where everybody had them. But Boss Nat was not wearing shorts. He was dressed as close as he could to civilian. Or military, since everything about him, from his neat short hair to his total erectness to the shine on his boots was like that.
He was the only one, though. The guys that brought me—shorts and short sleeves. One of them had been giving my long sleeves a sneer.
“All right, Hotdog,” the boss told him, “you and your buddy have other work to do.”
“Right boss,” Hotdog said, and they were gone.
The boss turned to his computer and typed something in. Then he turned to me. “You are now a servant at Alcazar. You will serve with distinction, or you will regret it. No offences will be tolerated. Now take off your browns.”
You could tell there was nothing sexual about the command. It was as if a machine had said it. A machine from Mars, perhaps, but a machine. He was wired up and plugged in, and he was programmed to run the inspection sequence.
Stand straight. Mouth open. Wider. Wiggle your tongue. Up. Down. Left. Right. Close. Lift your arms. Show me your pits. Left. Right. Show me your left ear. Right ear. Hand on your dick; wiggle it. Up. Down. Left. Right. Turn to the wall. Bend over. Open your cheeks. Hold em. Wider. Cough. Again. Wider. [Sound of gloves snapping on. Sound of me gasping when the hand went in.] Shut up. [Sound of gloves snapping off.] Stand up. Turn around. Now I’m gonna mug you. Look at the red light. The light up THERE. Now turn left. Turn right. Turn to the wall. You’re recorded. Clothes on. Rickie!”
A young white slap stepped forward from the corner of the room.
“Right boss.”
“This is a Class E.”
“Right boss.” Rickie took me by the arm and led me into another room. He was starting to say something when the door opened and two big slappies marched in.
I saw Rickie stiffen. No wonder—each of those slaps was twice his size. Picture two young muscle builders in slappie suits. Shorts, short sleeve shirts, and plenty of biceps, triceps, pecs, and dicks to fill it all out.
“Mr. Sharma want to see thee new slap,” one of them said.
“Right now? That’s sort of . . . . ”
“Right now, slappie,” the other one said. Or maybe it was the same one. It was hard to tell them apart—so hard that they must be twins. They were both about six feet four, and they were both equipped with stiff blond flattops, high, tanned cheekbones, steel-blue eyes, and taut red lips. One of them grabbed me by my right arm and pulled it behind my back, while the other one grabbed me by the left arm and cuffed the two together. “You’re like, a Class D?” he said to Rickie, giving my cuffs a yank that was meant for me to feel and Rickie to see. I looked at their shirts and saw CHAMP on one and CHIMP on the other. “My Name Is Chimp. How May I Serve You?”
“Uh, right . . . . That’s right,” Rickie said. “Sorry.”
“Awright, slappie,” the yanker told me. “March.”
To be continued …
